The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-10-08

open ar ana sunsnlne, ana the tonic influence of pleasant society. A thor ough washing-out with almost any sort of water, and lively imagina- tion, do the rest.
 Saratoga's popularity is certainly not due to any attractions in the way of natural scenery. All it's surround ings, though pretty, arc tame and commonplace. It has no mountains, no white-capped pillows. no rolling floods or rushing torrents, no cliffs, chasms, canyons or cataracts. What it pretentiously calls it's lake is an in- significant puddle hardly large enough to float Dakota wild duck and her brood of fuzzy ducklets. It is a town of taverns in a gently undulating, wooded country, suitable for raising pigs, pumpkins and potatoes. Hops flourish in it's sandy fields and it's overgrown hotels, and it's annual crop of tailors' geese and milliners' signs is abundant and never failing but of picturesqueness it has none. All it's landscapes combined would not make grazing ground for an aesthetic jack ass in Colorado.
 It's recognized pre- eminence among all our fashionable hot weather haunts cannot be based upon few brackish water-hole and flat calf pasture scenes; nor can it be owing to any special climatic advantages, for ther- mometers, barometers, hydrometers and anemometers are unanimous in recording none. When the dog-star foams at the mouth over New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo and Chicago, dude collars wilt and undammable riv- ulets of vulgar sweat cleave unsightly channels through the rouge and whitening on Fashions cheeks amid these high priced shades. The air is thick with flies and mosquitoes, and all the summer pests of Oshkosh and Kalamazoo, Bull Creek, and other unclassic realms abound.
 But whatever the cause, the fact re- mains: Saratoga is the Jumbo of American summer resorts; the big gest, gayest, giddiest, gaudiest of them all. Year after year, new ho- tels are built and old ones enlarged, whole rows of flats and boarding houses spring up among the pines and elms, and costly cottages rise like magic exhalations everywhere; but still the crowds increase, and the cry is ever, "Room, more room." Never has the throng been greater than dur ing the season just drawing to a close. The whole place has been overrun with people from every region of the country and tho globe. All the ho- tels have been jammed from cellar to skylight with men and women, some of whose names arc famous in war and statccraft, politics, finance, religion, art, science, literature, society and folly. Vcrandas, corridors, parlors and bathrooms have been vast crushes of gorgeous costumery and dazzles of jewels, and life has been perpetual dress parade, and dervish- dance to Strauss music, of fevered, pleasure hunting fashson- plates.
 The he and she Jenkinses of the press, the slush- tub- toters and taffy- daubers of journalism, have split all the pewter trumpcts of dollar-and- a-half-a column adulation, have smashed all the dictionaries of toady- ism and twaddle, in their mighty ef- forts to depict the glories of the gilded mob and its assembly, halls. They have boiled over with the wild est seidlitz- powder effervescencc of panegyric. They have gone into five lines-for-a- nickel raptures over the palatial hostelrics, the fairyland parks and gardens, the superb decorations, the royal equipages, and the miscella- neous and assorted magniticence in which every body and every thing have fioundered shoe- top-deep. They have melted the points off their stub-pens in glowing tributes to the illustrious- ness of the men and the surpassing beauty of the women, the rainbow outvieing, bird of paradise ceiling gorgeousness of the costumes, and the sun moon and -stars-eclipsing blaze of priceless gems. They have swept every chord and key of putfery's hurdygurdy Tyre in pro- claiming the brilliancy and wit, the elegance, culture, and refinement, of the hundred thousand headlights and leaders of new-world society who have made the Saratoga season of 1887 memorable, "it may be for years, and it may be forever"-or it may be, per- haps, until next summer, which is de- cidedly the may be- -st.
 According to these rhapsodiziacal eulogists every tavern is palace. compared with which all the archi- tectual miracles of hundred gener- ations of kings, princes and potcn- tates, all the resplendent creations of magi, genii, gnomes and fairies, and all tho celestial, sun-kissed fabrics of the gods themselves, dwindle to Kickapoo wigwams or Hottentot kraals. Every old fellow, who nurses